av Kenneth Nyberg

Etikettarkiv: Clay Shirky

Ethan Gach, responding to Aaron Bady’s critique of the piece by Clay Shirky that I quoted a month ago, discusses exactly what part of higher education will (or should) be unbundled by the coming of MOOCs and other forms of online learning:

The original point of the university was the efficiency of large classes and large faculties all housed in the same location. That efficiency can now be gained in other ways. Especially if you already have the tools to do most of the learning on your own, which large lectures more or less require anyway. […]

What putting lectures online does do is allow them to be revised, stored, and retrieved whenever need be. This is the point of textbooks, and while I would be the first to recognize the limits of most of them, they are extremely effective as repositories for standardized information and references. […]

Of course, to simply recommend then that all large lectures be turned into online courses skips an important question, which is whether they should be turned into small seminars instead. And this is the real alternative to online lectures (since, unlike Bady, I do think the physical lecture is a dead medium).

While not agreeing with every aspect of Gach’s reasoning – of which the above is only one small example – I think his contribution to the debate is very much worth reading.

Clay Shirky drills down into the question of what MOOCs are and what they are not:

The possibility MOOCs hold out isn’t replacement; anything that could replace the traditional college experience would have to work like one, and the institutions best at working like a college are already colleges. The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. MOOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies.

If he is right, the big question is: For how many current and potential students will MOOCs be “good enough” to justify not attending a traditional college?